Gran Turismo – To be the worst selling main title in the franchise

After the terrible numbers posted for GT6’s launch week in the UK, a mere 55,000, it’s clear the game is going to struggle to match the monster sales numbers of its predecessors. The number is as low as one fifth of the launch sales of GT5.
(Gran Turismo 6, Industry, PS3)

Why release it on the PS4 when SONY can't even meet demand WITHOUT the game.

80 million ps3

2 million PS4

Say 1 out of 2 owners buy the game....

50 million vs 1 million. Do the math.

In my honest opinion (and this opinion is VERY selfish) - I wish Sony would held off on releasing gt6 in 2013, and spent more resources towards polishing it for mid-late 2014 as a PS4 game. By that time, the hype for next gen would of one down significantly and Sony would have a bonafide system seller.

It would've faired so much better if it was released 6 months ago. I picked it up, I'm a HUGE racing fanatic and I have yet to take it out of it's wrapper because I can't stop playing the PS4.

If PD would've released it May-July? I would've taken the game out of it's wrapper walking out of the store on the way to my car. I would've walked in my house, tossed my keys on the counter, go immediately to my game room and load the disc in the PS3 while powering up my rig (FFB combo), grabbed a beverage from the fridge and probably would've played the game until I went to bed that night.

But Sony doesn't rush their products. Like it or hate it's just how they do business. Ultimately Kazunori Yamauchi makes the definitive decision and here we are.

I'm sure once I start playing GT6 it will eat up considerable amounts of my time allotted for gaming. Now with all this talk I think I'm going to tear the wrapper off today and take GT6 out for a spin.

i don't see it as a bad move, to me it just shows thay they keep supporting PS3 with high quality franchises. 80 million + PS3 are in the wild, not every player upgraaded to PS4 that day so let's say 5 million bought PS4 75 million potential buyers are still there. I haven't bought it yet due to PS4, but that not the case of everyone. Sales will rise, nothing alarming.

The problem with the game is that it was released in an awkward time, if it was going to be on the PS3 it should have released last year, if they were going to release it on the PS4 (which they should have) they should have released it exactly next year.

It's a catch 22 releasing the game late in 2013, PS3 is too old less people are gonna be inclined to buy, PS4 is too young very few people will but it this early in the life cycle.

It's also turned out to be quite a bit more expensive than GT5. I paid £27.00 at launch but this time there were virtually no deals to be had - £39 or £59 for a few more cars version and then they want more through micro transactions - no more winning cars after tier race events and the various Special events, also the winnings are now tiny per race.

Oh noooooooooeeess GT6 is doooooomed lol. Some of you really don't get it. GT is a huge slow moving monolith of a community. This "game" will sell millions on millions in its lifetime to the true believers. GT6 is absolutely fantastic, but people also forget how great GT5 is /right now/. This is not just another IP that one can look at, at any moment as a snapshot in time and say definitively the game is ___________ or ________, because it continuously evolves just like the GTR does. Look how GT5 was received at launch and then after the plethora of continuous updates, turned out to be one of the most played GT's of all time.

Now that the seasonals are to end on GT5 (no more easy grind money), you will see the behemoth of a community slowly migrate over to 6. Please hold your hyperbolic statements for a couple of months and then come back to see the sales trend then...

The format clearly needs a bit of a revamp as well let's face it. GT7 needs to be made for PS4 ground up, with everything shiny and next gen, and a bit of new perspective in the team to focus on what really matters in this genre.

"Computersaysno + 36m ago The format clearly needs a bit of a revamp as well let's face it. GT7 needs to be made for PS4 ground up, with everything shiny and next gen, and a bit of new perspective in the team to focus on what really matters in this genre."

Computersayno I agree with you that GT7 needs to be made from the ground up for the PS4 and it will mate. There have always been two GT's on every PS console. GT7 will be the first on the PS4.

People are forgetting how /awesome/ the PS3 really is. We (as a GT community) have never been spoiled like this before with the graphics and options that are present in current gen (PS3) on two iterations so close together (GT5 came out only three years ago). I have 93 friends on my friend's list who owned and played GT5 daily. When I turn on the PS3 it all says they are playing GT6. It may not have been as big of a first day sales figure as GT5 since people were clamoring for a new GT on the PS3 so badly (big wait from GT4) and now they are almost spoiled with two iterations on the PS3 within 3 years. GT6 will evolve (literally) and so will the sales. If am wrong by Spring '14 and after the whole holiday crush I will happily eat crow and these words and you can bookmark this for that.

Bought a PS4... all i play is my PS3 still (and this includes games like GT6)... the quality of games on the PS4 just isn't there yet. Wish it would have been released on PS4 though.... the game really shows its age.

Or they release GT6 on PS3, make money off that(a few million at least if not closer to GT5 first six months), and then port it to PS4 and use it as the foundation for GT7. Everyone who GT6 will buy GT7 so they get extra profit for little extra expense.

There are 80 million PS3's and only 2.4 million PS4's. Sure they could have netted a million pr two from a PS4 launch but I think it will sell very strong as a PS3 title.. I went tonight to buy it and both walmarts here were sold out... Can't be selling that bad. Besides we've only heard UK's numbers how can we determine lifetime sales from the first 4 days in the UK? Just people looking for problems where there are none..

Gt5 launched with a smaller PS3 install base and sold 5 times as many units in the same market. A one year delay for GT6 for PS4 would see the install base at over 10 million and at the perfect time to push consoles for Sony.

Same crap, different day. Where have I heard this before? Oh yeah! Gt5s launch, everyone claiming it had been too long and it wasn't relevant even citing that N/A numbers didn't break 1 million day 1 but it ended up selling over 10.5 million as of March. I doubt it'll do worse than gt2.

GT5 released to a huge amount of hype, it sold 2.4 million copies in its first week, with heavy bundling it went on to sell over 10.6 million to date. Without the mass bundling it would've only hit 9 million lifetime, which is still crazy huge.

GT6 released to no hype, its first week will be around 800k, just 1/3 what GT5 did. Even with heavy bundling it will only sell about 7 million lifetime. That's about 5 million not including bundles.

Relatively, GT6 is a huge flop and it deserves to be looking at the negative response to the game from fans and critics.

GT5 sold 5.5 million on day 1 and over 6 million its first week so this 2.4 in its first week is nonsense and they didn't even officially bundle GT5 with the ps3 in N/A until much later. It sold well but you clearly have forgotten what happened 3 years ago. People WERE claiming it wouldn't match historical figures when NPD revealed what the numbers were for November which was 700k+ and that wasn't enough for naysayers it had to do COD numbers right off the bat or it'd be a flop but it kept selling and is now nearly 3M in N/A alone. However later that week Polyphony made the announcement it sold 5.5 million and it shut people up but there were a few stragglers that claimed sells would tank after the first week and it couldn't pull 10m. These figures for UK are having responses similar to GT5 but these #s don't paint the whole picture. We now have digital sells which aren't counted in this and only 3 days of data. I'll wait for polyphony to update their numbers.

Problem with GT6 is that it made all the same mistakes as GT5. The press is getting tired of covering for Poly while they get their act together. Reviews especially in Europe were a bit more honest about the poor quality of the game this time around, I saw a lot of sites actually complaining about things that were also in GT5, that they looked the other way at, but now they are crying foul as if these are new issues.

I think the biggest problem isn't the PS4, but the marketing or lack there of. Sony pretty much announced GT 6 randomly and then it released. There weren't any hype, I saw no ads, so naturally it was going to sell poorly.

Edit: Face it: the only thing worse that if the game performed under Sony's sales expectations was if it Forza 5 sold more. At which point the internet would explode with articles about Forza being the leading franchise.

THIS is the real problem. Sure, the PS4 didn't help, but this game was both announced out of nowhere and released out of nowhere. I can't even recall seeing much, if any, news until I randomly saw the trophy list on a site.

The game released on the 6th Dec in the UK, so the sample data is tiny.

GT6 is available digitally as well, and those numbers are not included in these figures. GT5 was not available digitally, and I believe also came bundled with the PS3 in Europe. I've not seen a GT6 bundle.

The PS4 release will not have had much impact. God of War 2 sold well when it launched a couple of weeks before the PS3 released. Also, releasing GT6 on PS4 at this stage would be pointless as GT6 has been a good European system seller in the past - and at the moment supply is outstripping demand.

However, a possible sales detractor is that the marketing has been non-existent in the UK. I didn't even realise it was out!

The point is in the same amount of time GT6 sold 5 times less than GT5. The UK is a huge market for GT and if GT6 done so poorly here it must have done so everywhere else.

God of War 2 released a couple of months after the PS3 launched and it did amazingly well, almost as well as GoW1 but that's probably because at the time PS3's were backwards compatible so a lot of people could simply play the game on their PS3.

I did that myself and I know a lot of people did. Since the PS4 isn't bc GT6 won't have the same advantage so I'm confident that as well as being the lowest rated Gran Turismo it will also be the worst selling.

Hmmm, it just dawned on me that GoW & GT are Sony's top 2 biggest franchises and both had new games release this year that are the lowest rated & selling in both franchises history. I hope they both bounce back on PS4.

Ppl on the thread keep bringing up that there are 80 million ps3's sold so it makes sense to do it on Ps3 rather than ps4. Well IMO i wish it was a Ps4 title because the exclusives thus far are lacking on ps4 but it didnt necessarily need to be a launch title. I woulda been happy with a janaury to spring release on ps4.

Out of the 80,000,000 ps3's im 2 of them. One purchased at ps3 launch then a ps3 slim after the 1st ps3 caught the YLOD. I still have my ps3 only because im still playing GTA5 and gonna move it to my Bedroom for a Netflix player. But im not really interested in buying current gen games.

Agreed, that's why i think it should have come a year into the PS4's life. Maybe even 6 months. Install base would be big enough and it's at a time when sales are over the initial launch. GT6 would have helped move consoles then. But if that happened the DC delay would have made things interesting.

Since you did let me just say you are wrong. Forza games normally sell between 2-3 million without bundling, 4-5 million with.

And when was Forza bundled with Skyrim? Skyrim has never had an official console bundle.

GT5 was bundled from launch and it's still being bundled to date. It sells well early but the hype dies down fairly quickly and then it mostly depends on bundling to keep up a good pace.

It's the same with LBP, Resistance: FOM, Motorstorm, UC2 and UC3. All depend on mass bundling to add a few million sales. Also TLoU had a massive boost due to the black Friday bundling, it will also be bundled for a few years to come.

GoW3 & GT5 are the only Sony games that didn't need bundling to be huge. GoW3 is on the way to 7 million with the new Saga collection reinvigorating sales & GT5 would've still sold 9 million without bundling.

Even with mass bundling GT6 won't even come close to GT5 even if you take away its sales from bundles.

You're wrong in the main sense but right in a secondary sense. For GT, the first month's sales are usually not even half of what it goes on to. GT5 is still selling but so far it's the exception. GT5 was aso released in a big gap of pretty much nothing at the end of 2010 so it got more publicity and sold faster. GT6 is released during a console launch and decent multiplatform lineup for PS3. It will still sell a lot but it probably will be the lowest seller which isn't a bad thing considering GT7 could be sooner rather than later.

lol dum people still forgetting there gran turismo coming to the ps4 there not worrying about sell at all. just like gta5 they left with a bang and sure they did left with a bang this game overkill monster racing game. my mind is going nut just thinking about the ps4 version that coming. At end of the day GT6 still going sell no matter ps4 or ps3.

I don't think the PS4 has anything to do with it if that was the case BF and COD numbers would of suffered on the PS3 and they did not.

I am wondering if it is because of the Mess GT5 was in when it came out and also feeling like an incomplete game.

One of the guys in my office has it and said its a big improvement on 5 which is really good to here but I am wondering if the damage has been done with 5. I hope sales do pick up as GT has always been a good game (Apart from 5) but I don't think it is anything to do with the PS4 at all as it has only sold around 2 million consoles the PS3 has 80 million consoles sold.

Selling the slowest of the Gran Turismo games? All but one have sold over 10 million without counting the secondary releases (Concept, Prologue). I don't think Sony will go bankrupt or end the GT franchise if they don't break 10 million sales yet again, especially considering how much success they are having with the PS4 launch. Most developers would kill for "slow" Gran Turismo sales. Even a fraction of that, actually.

It makes great financial sense to release more than one full GT game on PS3. It also works out pretty well for PS3 owners who haven't been able to snag a PS4 or aren't ready to move to PS4. They still have some pretty awesome games to enjoy on PS3.

Let this be an important lesson to publishers who think "hey, lets make our game on all previous gen systems too!"

Fact is, Next gen is what we've been waiting for, it's what we're willing to spend more money on now. Just because an install base is huge doesn't mean that magically everyone who owns that system is going to buy the game.

Consoles have a lot of people who buy them on whims and people who aren't really into gaming so that massive install base is fool's gold. Gamers are gamers. Gamers will buy games. Gamers are buying PS4/Xb1. That simple.

You haven't played it, and we all know it. You haven't even read the reviews. Well, one or two that you sought to confirm that the game is "bad," as you want to believe. That your comment history is full of anti-PlayStation BS takes away whatever credibility you thought your comment would have.

It'll sell fine. It's being sold at the end of a generation. The next generation of consoles- particularly the PS4, but also the XB1- is breaking records as far as sales are concerned. And the lack of hardware-native backwards compatibility means many have sold their PS3s for the PS4 and have no way to even play the games still to come on 7th generation hardware.

Love how folks act like this is some indicator that the game will do poorly. As if GT games- and PS exclusives, in general- aren't possessed of long legs.

If someone can give me an example of a GT that was in a similar position and did better, then I'll admit GT6 is doing poorly. But if there's no such preexisting situation, then I don't see what the basis is for saying GT6 will fail, flop, or otherwise do poorly.

The idea of " releasing GT6 as a PS4 launch game " wasn't even a thought since DriveClub was supposed to be the poster child along side Knack and Killzone.

GT6 producers were thinking " there are 80 millions ps3s in the wild vs PS4 launch people...Hmmm. Which way should we go ? The answer should be obvious. ( They already said the the game would come to next gen in a couple of years anyway since porting the game seems a lot easier. )

Let's not assume PS3 games won't sell no matter how great they are because the next-gen consoles are out there. In terms of quality in respect to ps3 standards, Gt6 is better than most next-gen launch games by a good margin.

By the way, didn't GT6 have around 200k pre-orders ? As many mentioned the world-wide sales numbers aren't out there yet. On the other hand, I personally do not expect GT6 to sell a lot.

I don't believe it's due to the release being so close to PS4. If that was true then GTAV wouldn't have sold as many copies as it did. I believe that once the people found out about the microtransactions it hurt the sales. Plus too, GT is a niche game. Not everyone wants to, or knows how to tune the cars to get the most out of them. Most folks just want to race the cars. I feel the novelty of the GT series may have worn off.

A franchise that has 4 games over 10 million is a niche series? Not many exclusive games sell 10 million copies. Personally i hate the whole micro transactions thing but i don't think it hurt sales because not too many people even knew about it before launch.